A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

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Wednesday, July 20, 2016

A RESPONSE TO SOME COMMENTS

Periodically, an agitated exchange breaks out in
the placid comments section of this blog, usually occasioned by my remarks on
politics [although sometimes the accessibility of the umlaut is sufficient to
excite the commentariat.] I should like
to address two aspects of the recent kerfuffle.
Let me begin with the dispute about wisdom versus foolishness, stupidity
versus intelligence [and, I might add, ignorance versus
knowledgeableness.] In a later post, I
shall move on to the tendency of some people in America to vote against what
others perceive to be their interests [The Thomas Frank problem.]

I distinguish sharply between the acquisition of
academic credentials and the possession of either intelligence or knowledge. It is of course true [indeed, it is what logicians
used to call a miserable tautology] that people who do not have college degrees
have fewer educational credentials than those who do have college degrees. But a long lifetime of experience as a university
professor equips me to say authoritatively that there is very little
demonstrable connection between possessing educational credentials and being
either smarter or more knowledgeable than someone not possessing them. To be sure, getting a college degree is likely
to make someone more knowledgeable about some
things [although even this is less obviously true than I, as a teacher, would
like to think], but I rather doubt that the total number of things known by a
person with a college degree is greater or less than the total number of things
known by a person without a college degree.
However, the knowledge one manages to acquire in college, along with the
habits, social traits, and stigmata left by the college experience, greatly
increase the probability that one will get a job with good pay and benefits and
no heavy lifting.

I am the product of a family that valued book
learning [my father was a high school teacher], and my entire adult life has
been spent in the upper middle class of American society, where what I know and
what I can do are richly rewarded. But I
am reminded of the 2010 movie Company Men
in which Ben Affleck plays a successful corporate executive who is laid off and
eventually is forced to take a job with his carpenter brother-in-law [Kevin
Costner] laying sheetrock. Affleck is
just awful at it, despite having the full panoply of educational credentials
that his brother-in-law lacks.

I am reminded of the old joke about the
counter-cultural Scholastic Aptitude Test, one question on which is “Who is
buried in Grant’s Tomb?” All the kids
from the toney up-scale schools get it wrong, but all the ghetto kids get it
right. [The correct answer is, “Yo’
mama.”]

More seriously, I call to mind the debate on the
left in South Africa about whether township residents, after liberation, should
be awarded educational credentials for the things they had learned quite well
without the benefit of access to the nation’s rigid, highly traditional English
or European oriented universities. Black
men and women who had for years run the shadow township governments of Soweto
or Alexandra had acquired thereby a great deal more usable knowledge about
Political Science than their white age cohorts who had studied the subject at
the University of Capetown or Stellenbosch University.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.